WeplaySports.com: A Story of finding Niches Online
Weplay Sports is an online sporting goods store founded in 1982. The store is family owned and the major positions are family operated. Weplay sports, unlike most websites, also has an actual storefront where you can walk right in and buy whatever you want. They supply equipment for almost every mainstream team sport you can think of. They also offer sports collectibles and memorabilia for the Indians, Browns, Yankees, and Brooklyn Dodgers. Their major revenue producers are football and wrestling goods. The business has about twenty employees and has been growing at an unbelievable pace. They bought a new warehouse to hold all their stock which was about 6 times as big as their original store and within 5 years they had completely filled it. The story of Weplay Sports is how they find an underserved market and adapt to the changing business environment.
Weplay Sports was started by Glenn Haney and his son Andy Haney in 1982, when Glen was in his late thirties. He originally started a little running shoes specialty shop. His son Andy was a track star and had been running all his life, so Glen had become quite an expert on running shoes. He thought of starting the store when he realized how hard it was to find good track and cross-country shoes. After that he started the store in a little shop in a shopping plaza and called it Haney’s Sporting Goods.
The store did well as it received a lot of business from referrals. Andy would tell his friends on the cross-country team or track team to shop at his dad’s store and they would come to the store to get their shoes. They in turn would tell their friends and soon the business grew. The business was steadily growing until a Dick’s Sporting Goods store was set up about four minutes down the road. People did not want expert advice and variety. They wanted a store that offered low prices and convenience.
Glen was about to call it quits when Andy, who had just finished college, told his dad to try and hold on for six more months. Andy had started using this new invention called the internet where people could go on it and find just about anything. He thought that maybe their store could try and sell their shoes on it. Glen did not think it would work, but he was desperate. He made the website with the address of weplay.com. The store immediately took off; they had so many orders for shoes they did not know what to do. Weplay Sports was one of the first sporting goods stores on the web.
Looking back on these times, they said this was the golden age of their store. They had no competition and whatever they put on the website sold. At this point they expanded their operations to selling baseball, football, volleyball, wrestling, basketball, and cheerleading equipment. They actually became a threat to major retailers. With things going as good as they were for them, it was only a matter of time before other entrepreneurs realized the potential to make money and fill the consumer’s needs. Stores like Wal-Mart and Dick’s Sporting Goods started their own online websites to complement their stores. People started to pick the mainstream store and once again Weplay was in danger of going out of business. Andy and Glenn had to figure out what the problem was. They asked themselves why they seemed to have periods of great growth and then without warning a crash in sales. They realized that the problem was that Wal-Mart and Dick’s are bigger and better than they ever could be. The only way they could possibly compete with Wal-Mart and Dick’s was to not compete with them. What had made them successful in both of the previous times was serving under-developed markets.
Large chain stores are in it to serve the masses, but the minorities often get neglected. It is not worth their time to carry in their warehouse all the specific items hard core sports addicts want. This is where Weplay Sports comes in. They carry the items that large retailers do not carry. When you are talking about the web, you can afford the really specific. Weplay started to carry more specialized shoes and more high end shoes. They also stopped carrying running shoes and basketball shoes because stores like Footlocker, Adidas, and Nike already did an excellent job supplying these to customers . For the first time ever they started to carry gear and safety equipment. Once again the business started to take off.
Glenn said that he thinks Weplay is starting to see their sales dip again. He thinks that this may be happening because their products are starting to get too mainstream and they need to reevaluate their products. Football shoes used to be one of their biggest sellers, but they took a huge loss this year. The reason is parents were able to get the shoes they carried at Dicks. In the future they plan on carry football shoulder pads, football helmets, lacrosse gear, and other football gear.
Another problem WePlay is having to deal with is economically finding ways of telling people about their website. Over a billion people have access to the web, so the amount of customers a business can have is unimaginable. That being said, it is hard to get only the people actually interested in the store on the site. Weplay Sport’s main form of advertising is sponsored clicks. When a person types in the words “wrestling shoes” in a Google search engine, hundreds of websites will pop up; the top three will be a slightly different color. Those three are sponsored links, what most people do not realize is how much stores pay for them. For a phrase like “football stickers” it might be 35 cents a click, but for a phrase like “wrestling shoes” it might be more like 3 dollars a click. During Christmas time Weplay sports can end up paying Google 70,000 dollars a day. They have to sell a lot of stuff just to break even.
Andy is currently working on ways to build up customer loyalty and to find advertising methods outside of the sponsored click method. One of the ways is offering previous customers coupons or asking them if they want e-mail notification of new items. The problem with online businesses is that since customers do not actually see the people they are buying from or go into the store they feel no loyalty to it. Weplay is currently trying to break down that barrier and have customers see them as that local mom and papa shop that everyone wants to support even though they are on the web.
Whether it is trying to find the next niche in sporting goods equipment or finding a niche in people’s minds, Weplay Sports is constantly working to gain a competitive advantage. This is a very challenging job when their competition is big, more experienced, and has more resources, but they have been doing it successfully for 26 years. They have to it for it is their livelihood that is at stake. Both Andy and Glen are confident that they will be even more successful in the next 26 years. They know that the face of Weplay will be completely different than anything they can imagine, but that is what it takes in the business world.
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